Mumbai: Monorail service resumes after fire incident forced shutdown in November
The monorail currently operates on an 8.9-km route between Chembur and Wadala.
Mumbai’s monorail service from Chembur to Wadala resumed on Saturday, nearly 10 months after it was shut over safety concerns following a fire that engulfed two coaches, ANI reported. The services along the 8.9-km route will be operational between 6 am and 10 pm with a frequency of 15 minutes.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority has revised the maintenance cost it pays the operator – a consortium of Larsen & Toubro and Scomi Engineering – to Rs 10,600 from Rs 4,500 per trip, The Times of India reported. “The fares (Rs five to 11) will not be revised until the entire corridor from Chembur to Jacob Circle is operational,” said Dilip Kawathkar, joint director of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority. The second phase, which will extend the line to Jacob Circle, is scheduled to be operational by January 2019.
The single-track elevated train service – India’s first monorail – had been operating on a short stretch since 2014. Building this stretch of the monorail cost the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority Rs 1,100 crore, and it expected a footfall of at least 1.5 lakh commuters a day. Instead, in the three years of its operations, average daily ridership was just 19,000, and the monorail trains ran at a loss of nearly Rs 3 lakh a day.